George Clooney will become a Broadway actor for the first time next year when he stars as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, a stage adaptation of his 2005 Oscar-nominated film.
Directed by Tony Award winner David Cromer (The Band’s Visit), Good Night, and Good Luck will premiere on Broadway in Spring 2025 at a Shubert Theatre to be announced.
“I am honored, after all these years, to be coming back to the stage and especially, to Broadway,” Clooney said in a statement, “the art form and the venue that every actor aspires to.”
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The stage play is co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, based on their screenplay for the film. Producing will be Seaview, Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Jean Doumanian and Robert Fox, who jointly announced the production today.
In a statement, director Cromer said, “Edward R. Murrow operated from a kind of moral clarity that feels vanishingly rare in today’s media landscape. There was an immediacy in those early live television broadcasts that today can only be effectively captured on stage, in front of a live audience.”
In the 2005 film, Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman, was played by David Strathairn, with Clooney portraying Murrow’s friend and producer Fred Friendly. The film chronicled Murrow’s efforts, despite pressure from CBS corporate sponsors, to expose the lies and corruption of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Senate investigation ostensibly designed to expose American Communists.
The black-and-white film, which Clooney directed, was a success critically and commercially, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Strathairn.
Prior to Clooney’s TV work and breakthrough on the NBC 1990s drama ER, he appeared in various small Los Angeles stage productions, most notably in a well-received performance as a street hustling drug dealer in a 1984 production of Vicious, about the punk star Sid Vicious and the girlfriend he allegedly murdered Nancy Spungen.
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Just like Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible to reflect issues in his own troubled times, Clooney and Heslov have reached back to Murrow to comment on the current state of media. This is a wonderful, meaningful film, so I expect the professionals involved will put on an impressive production that hopefully will leave folks thinking about the the influence of media, the power of corporations, and the impact of insulation from real thought that technology has wrought. As Murrow says, “This instrument can teach. It can illuminate and, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights — in a box.”